Gaps in Transmission: Reading Lacan’s Télévision

This article offers a close reading of Jacques Lacan’s Télévision (1974), which is both a text and a filmed artifact. It takes as its starting point Lacan’s claim that Télévision was a failure. It argues that Lacan called attention to this failure in order to reflect on it as a productive force in psychoanalysis, but also in his own performance, thus making Télévision a meditation on failure that enacts the thing that it anatomizes. The article traces the contours of this “failure,” paying close attention to the paradoxes and equivocations of the text and of the film. It considers Lacan’s failure in light of his own avowed clownishness in Télévision and relates this to his theoretical reflections on the comic in the text. To understand what a rupture Télévision constituted from televisual conventions of the time, the article then situates it in relation to the traditions of televised philosophy in France, a context that has been largely disregarded in accounts of Télévision. The final two sections then bring this together under the rubric of the failure in meaning. Noting that Lacan in the early 1970s was interested in what was not working out, most notably in what he called the rapport sexuel, it argues that these failures or gaps were not reasons for despair, but instead openings for invention and innovation, including of the creation of neologisms such as linguisterie and jouis-sens, and the reworking of concepts such as gay sçavoir, which we demonstrate at work in the enigmatic final words of Télévision.